Historian and publisher Karl Heinz Roth told broadcaster Deutsche Welle over the weekend Poland’s wartime losses—comprising material damage, human loss as well as forced labour— could be estimated at USD 78 billion in 1938.“Today that’s over USD 1 trillion,” he said adding that the Greek parliamentary committee investigating the issue has come up with a German compensation at the level of €380 billion.
He said that after the war Poland as well as Greece “shared the fate of so-called small allies” and have been “marginalised in terms of reparations policy.”
He also said that “the issue of compensation is an ethical problem, Germany has an obligation to pay.”
“A multilateral solution” was needed to address calls for reparations from Poland and Greece as well as “other countries where similar initiatives have emerged over the years: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, and [the former] Yugoslavia.”
“Only in this way can the huge reparations debt be repaid,” Roth said.
He added that “the reparation debt is not subject to a statute of limitations and is still open.”
Neither Greece nor Poland can put Germany under pressure if they act alone. They have to join forces,” Roth stressed.
Last month, German Professor Ulrich Battis, an expert in constitutional law, told DW that most likely, the German government is less worried about the possibility of paying war reparations to Greece, for example, than it is about setting a legal precedent. Other former wartime enemies, occupied countries and colonies might similarly demand reparations.
Therefore, Roth’s approach seem to be in the very right direction
Greek-Polish Alliance
The Greek and Polish reparations committees are reportedly working hand in hand to exert pressure on Germany.
“Yes, there has been a meeting,” the president of the Greek reparations committee Triantafyllos Mitafides and his Polish counterpart and PiS parliamentarian Arkadiusz Mularczyk confirmed. The latter said the Greek report was very insightful but stressed Poland would deliver a much more detailed paper.
Athens and Warsaw hope Germany will be willing to compromise as the pressure mounts. “We assume that Berlin will want to settle our claims individually,” Mularczyk thinks. But he has already thought this possibility through. “If we get stuck, we could ‘internationalize’ our cooperation.”
Greece
In 1941, Nazi forces invaded and subsequently occupied Greece; according to official figures, 300,000 people were killed under Nazi occupation. Greece was exploited economically, and when German forces withdrew from the country, they laid waste to its infrastructure. The Nazis also forced the Bank of Greece of issue a “loan” worth the equivalent of some €10 billion ($11.5 billion) to cover the “costs of occupation.”
Yet Germany never repaid this debt, and the government has repeatedly stated that the issue of repayment or reparations is closed.
The German government has repeatedly referred to two past agreements. In 1960, Germany reached a deal with several European governments over the payment of 115 million Deutschmark (€59 million, $68 million in current terms). Moreover, German lawmakers say, an “extensive war reparations scheme was established,” from which Greece supposedly benefited as well. The Two Plus Four Agreement struck between East and West Germany as well as the four occupying powers after German reunification in 1990, meanwhile, stated that “no further war reparation” would be made.
No matter what the German government claims, the Greek special committee on the WWII reparations is expected to submit its report to the Plenary towards end of 2018. A vote will follow.
Worth reading is KTG article on Roth/Rübner “Reparation debt. Mortgages of German occupation in Greece and Europe” German researchers dug into historical documents about the disputed WWII reparations. They have discovered and calculated that the German state owes Greece 185 billion euros. “Of this not even a 1% has been paid to Greece.” The reparations issue was not solved in 1960, as Berlin has been claiming.
Poland
According to Radio Poland, earlier this year, the head of a Polish team assessing potential reparations said that Germany could owe Poland USD 850 billion for damage it inflicted in World War II.
“We are talking about very large, but justified amounts of compensation for war crimes, for destroyed cities, villages, the lost demographic potential of our country,” Arkadiusz Mularczyk, an MP with Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice party, was quoted as saying at the time.
Polish and German experts in September discussed the sensitive topic of war reparations at a conference in Warsaw.
Roth told DW that wartime destruction in Poland “was undoubtedly the biggest in size.” He added that the Germans “acted according to a systematic plan” of destruction and that around 5.4 million civilians were killed during Nazi occupation in Poland.
An analysis by Polish parliamentary experts found last year that the government in Warsaw was entitled to demand reparations from Germany.
German officials have said that the issue was definitively settled with Poland in 1953, when the then Polish communist government recognized in a resolution that Germany had fulfilled its obligations with regard to Poland and decided against seeking compensation.
But Poland’s ruling conservatives have said that decisions made by the country’s communist-era authorities are not still valid because they were made under pressure from the Soviet Union.
